Up-and-coming Brooklyn rapper Kennedy Joseph Noel, known as KJ Balla, was murdered in a drive-by shooting in New York, Friday.
“He’s never coming home,” Noel’s mother Valencia Smith cried to the New York Daily News. “He was my only son!"
"Jealousy and envy overtook your hearts and took a very important piece of my heart,” she continued. “I’m so heartbroken. It’ll never be the same for me.”
“He used to dance on the trains when he was little,” she added. “Then he started rapping. He was very charismatic. He was really into his rap career, waiting for it to take off.”
Noel was only a mile from his home where he was shot.
“Somebody had called my niece and told her check on KJ, they said he got shot," his aunt Jacqueline Smith said. “As soon as we heard everybody just ran to the hospital."
A 26-year-old man was also shot in the back, stomach, and arm. The man survived and checked himself into Brookdale Hospital Medical Center.
Noel co-founded his label Nothing Records.
No arrests have been made in connection to the shooting.
“They’re going to be found out,” Noel’s aunt said about his killer. “Witnesses say they saw someone in a dark hoodie fleeing.”
[Via]